Agincourt or Azincourt? Victory, Defeat and the War of 1415 - Dr Helen Castor

thank you all very much indeed thank you Richard for that very kind welcome and I've clearly missed a trick because I'm starting not with one of my own books which is clearly an error but I wanted to begin with a brief glimpse of this book because it seems to be exactly the kind of historical digest that we've all been waiting for history's greatest hits and I don't know if you can see here down at the bottom further explanation famous events we should all know more about it's a rather Stern subtitle I thought and it's premise is probably unarguable there are certainly plenty of famous events that I should not great deal more about but the particular reason I wanted to start with it today is that it raises the question of what exactly history's greatest hits are and how they might be chosen let's take a look at what the contents page offers us from 500 years of the Middle Ages and Renaissance it's a select bunch starting at the top here with 1066 the Battle of Hastings moving swiftly through the Crusades and past Magna Carta in 1215 before encountering the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century and then here right in the middle comes 1415 and the Battle of Agincourt it me not closely at this small selection it's one of only two battles than make it into this medieval hit parade first of all we have Hastings the last successful invasion of England a battle that changed the course of this country's history forever the second battle in this list the Battle of Agincourt didn't so why is it there well the answer in one word I think is Shakespeare in the english-speaking world and by the way we know we're in the english-speaking world because if you look one further on from Agincourt you find 1431 the execution of Joan of Arc not 1429 the victories of Joan of Arc which surely it would be if this were a French list but in the english-speaking world Shakespeare's play Henry the fifth of 1599 has fixed this battle in our collective imagination it's inserted it into our cultural DNA and that's not just because of Shakespeare's genius with words although there's plenty about on display in Henry v as the play moves from over a muse of fire via once more into the breach dear friends all the way to we few we happy few we band of brothers it's packed with gorgeous lines but it's also a play with an almost mythical narrative arc a young man a young King newly come to his throne is determined after a misspent youth to live up to the weight of dignity and responsibilities that he's now inherited he has an ancient enemy who doesn't take him seriously you may remember at the very beginning of the play the French send a gift they say to suit his temperament tennis balls my liege first his uncle a line that somehow in my theatrical memory always pairs itself with Lady Bracknell's a handbag but this is a young king who has charisma integrity moral purpose and a vision of his country's destiny he launches a great invasion of the kingdom across the sea that he claims as his he takes the port of Harfleur and marches on only to be confronted by the might of the French army this army is made up of huge numbers and it's led by the princes of the blood who with supreme disdain and condescension assume that victory is rightfully naturally theirs even before a blow is struck you may remember there's another wonderful scene the night before the battle which opens with the constable of France declaring languidly I have the best armor in world but back in the English ranks on the eve of battle Henry confronts a long dark night of the soul and he comforts his men with a little touch of Harry in the night and then the next day when battle is joined it turns out that this is the tale of David and Goliath the proud and arrogant French have brought down against all the odds by the courage and heart the resilience and the endurance of the English army and then after this astonishing triumph this moment of catharsis Henry gets his reward the hand of a French princess sweetly wooed across the divided language and he's recognised as the heir to the French throne but of course the Laureus as it is this is a drama and what I want to do today is to take a closer look at what we think we know about a drink or to consider whether the way we think about the battle is an accurate reflection of 15th century reality and to ask Shakespeare aside does it really deserve its place among history's greatest hits now I ought to make clear first of all that I'm not in a specialist sense a military historian but of course it's impossible to write about any period of human history without writing at some stage many stages about war and in tackling the subject of my most recent book Joan of Arc the most famous female soldier ever not only was war inescapable as the defining context of her life and her brutal death but when I sat down to write it turned out that it was a Schinkel that presented itself as my starting point and in taking action core is my starting point my focus wasn't principally on troop movements and topography on battle plans and tactics not just because of my own lack of expertise but also because in dealing with the Middle Ages those neat diagrams with rectangular blocks moving across battlefields under the leadership of large black arrows can be significantly misleading because this is a context where it can be tricky to establish even how many soldiers fought on each side to the nearest couple of thousand let alone where the stood and exactly what they did instead what fascinates me is the psychology and the politics of war so what I'm going to start with in talking about Agincourt today isn't the battlefield it's the naming of things the labels that we attach to the past shape the way that we think about history and they do it so profoundly that we need to keep a close eye on what that process does to our understanding let's think for a moment even about the name of this battle we call it a zinc or as in court but there's no such place on the French map over there it's as uncool and a large part of what I want to talk about today is the French experience of the dreadful defeat of a phone call rather than the victory of the happy few at Agincourt straight away it's clear that we might be dealing with two different stories depending on where we stand to view the fighting but as you call or as ein calls either way forms part of a grander narrative and one that also deserves our attention for a moment that's the narrative of the Hundred Years War if we want to understand the past we have to understand how our protagonists saw themselves and the world in which they lived we need to understand the choices they face as seen through their eyes knowing only what they knew when they made them because once hindsight comes into play we're no longer understanding the past in its own terms and the Hundred Years War is a good example of why that matters it only takes a moment once we stop ourselves to think to realize that those who fought in it had no idea that it was the Hundred Years War they were fighting for them it wasn't over till it was over and they didn't know when that would turn out to be in fact the Hundred Years War is a term first coined in the 19th century like so many of the other neat and evocative formulations that we use about our medieval past the Wars of the Roses being another although in this case unlike the Wars of the Roses the Hundred Years War is a term that was first coined in French llegará de San Tong and the first usage recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary it's from 1874 Junior green in his short history of the English people in 1453 he declares the Hundred Years War ended and what green and the others who first used the term was suggesting was that the many phases of conflict between England and France that took place between 1337 and 1453 so a period of 116 years rather than around hundred but this conflict as a whole had a unifying principle a connecting cause and further they were suggesting that that cause was the English claim to the French throne first made by Edward the third here here's looking rather splendid on his tomb in right of his French mother Isabella the daughter of Philip the fourth of France now this English claim to the French throne was one that Edward and the English kings who succeeded him tried to make good by military means until the moment in 1453 when all English lands in France were finally lost ba the fortified town of Calais which lasted one more century until the French recaptured it in 1558 at which point famously also legend has it a few months later Mary Tudor died she said with Calais engraved on her heart so if we put it like that it's entirely possible to see the case for treating this century of conflict as a whole or at least having some kind of continuity at its core but if we look a little more closely the picture gets more complicated England had held territory in France ever since the conquest of 1066 English Kings held the conquerors Duchy of Normandy until it was lost by bad King John in 1204 but by then the English also held the Duchy of Aquitaine in southwestern France which had been brought to the crown by John's mother Eleanor of Aquitaine when she married henry ii in the middle of the 12th century and the extent of this English territory in France and the terms by which kings of England held it from the kings of France gave rise to war between the two kingdoms for significant stretches of the two centuries before 1337 so by 1337 war between England and France over rival territorial and Tennille claims already had deep roots and a long history it's true that an English claim to the French throne hadn't been part of that previous conflict but it's debatable whether the assertion of that claim was in fact a radical reformulations the conflict between the two sides or whether it was more just another string to the English Kings bow Edward the third whose claim it was gave it up in 1360 only a quarter of the way through the hundred years of the Hundred Years War as part of the terms of a treaty that I'll tell you more about in a moment it was then revived by his successors but 1453 didn't mark the end of the claim Henry the eighth for one was certainly serious about prosecuting it when he took an army to France in the early 16th century and it wasn't finally given up and dropped from the English royal title until 1801 now all of that suggests that we might need to take a closer look at the shape of events between 1337 and 1453 if we're going to get the hang of what was actually happening in France in the early decades of the 15th century and specifically in 1415 it's important to recognize that warfare wasn't constant between 1337 and 1453 either in form or in the very fact of their being fighting at all Edward the 3rd for example one great successes at sea at choice in 1314 if there any Dutch speakers here apologies for my pronunciation he won at crécy famously in 1346 and at poitiers in 1356 when the french king himself was captured but in 1360 as I've said Edward gave up his claim to the French throne as part of the Treaty of Bretton ye in return for holding the territories of Aquitaine but upon cheer Jean and Calais not as a vassal of the French crown any longer but now in full sovereignty then there was peace for nine years then war resumed because of French determination to overthrow the terms of the treaty for 20 years from 1369 until 1389 then a temporary truce was agreed followed seven years later by an agreement for a further truce which was intended to last 28 years so here in the last decade of the 14th century was a period of peace between England and France in which the whole ostensible project of the war the English claim to the French throne was if not yet settled at least in abeyance and here therefore is where we need to look more closely at exactly how events unfolded on both sides of the channel how and why did the armies of England and France come to face each other on the field at as uncle on the 25th of note of October 1415 the answer is that both kingdoms were plunged into periods of devastating turmoil but with very different results in England peace with France had been pursued by Edwards grandson Richard the second Richard was the son of the Black Prince but it turned out that he had none of his father's military ambition or talents instead Richard saw a much greater enemy facing his sovereignty the greatest lords of his own realm who he believed were threatening what should have been his own supreme power in his kingdom his great Lords on the other hand thought they were exercising their customary right and duty to advise their King on the welfare and security of the realm and it was a symptom of how wide the breach between them came and how rapidly but in 1386 during a financial crisis in parliament richard declared that if his subjects continued to rebel against him he would seek the advice and the help of his kinsmen the King of France against them now that turned out not to be the most tactful thing to say when the cause of the whole financial crisis was the fact that a French fleet was currently massing in the channel in preparation for a planned invasion these repeated crises came to a head in 1399 by which time the 28 year truce with France had been sealed and Richard was married to a nine year old French princess but in 1399 Richard tried to disinherit his cousin Henry Bolingbroke Duke of Lancaster without any legal justification the country would no longer support him in this tyranny and Bolingbroke deposed the king and took his place as King Henry the fourth but user patien brings its own problems and during a torrid 14-year reign facing rebellion financial crisis and chronic illness Henry made no move to reactivate the English claim to France that was to change in 1413 with the accession of his son Henry v now by this stage in his life we shouldn't be thinking of Henry as one of the lads whatever mischief Prince Howard got up to henry v as king was a ruthless and formidable able ruler with an unyielding sense of his god-given purpose and we might want to relate this sense of mission to one of his earliest military experiences his first command at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 42 1403 at the age of just 16 when he took an arrow full in the face and although the shaft was pulled out easily the arrow head was deeply embedded six inches in to one side of his nose and the wound had to be kept open for six weeks while the surgeon who was treating him designed and made a special implement to remove it now somehow without anaesthetic without antibiotic Henry survived although we might note that this famous portrait of him which survives in this later copy shows him in profile perhaps to disguise the scar that he must have carried for the rest of his life and along with the scar he also carried a sense of his own invincibility the certainty that God had not only saved but chosen him for a special destiny and that destiny was to renew the claim to France bequeathed to him by his royal ancestor Edward the third and so after two years of putting his house in order at home in what is a terrifyingly impressive fashion I did my PhD many moons ago on the Duchy of Lancaster the private estate at the Lancastrian kings and as you're reading through the accounts and you come to 1415 and Henry the fifth succession you can suddenly feel the cold wind whistling past the years of the administrators as they realize that under this new regime not one single penny will escape the new Kings notice it's a formidable campaign during those first two years of the reign to restore order to the country and to the royal finances but that turned out merely to be approved to the launching of a great expedition to France in August 14 15 by that stage Henry had gathered an army of something like 12,000 soldiers perhaps twice that number of horses as well as support staff and supplies in a fleet of 1500 ships now Henry knew his history and though he was emulating Edward the third in his claim to France his tactics were different 14th century English armies had combined what was called the cheveux chez devastating raids across huge swathe of French territory with the taking of particular fortresses which were then to be garrisoned and held as islands of strategic power but Henry didn't want to do that the idea of all of that being really to force the French into compromise into negotiation what Henry wanted to do was to take territory to make good his claim by a systematic relentless and disciplined advance into Normandy across land that could then be ruled and crucially taxed to support further advances deep into the heart of France itself he would start with the port of Harfleur a bridgehead that would hold the key to the invasion of Normandy in a way that the existing English possession of Calais much further north never could now Henry succeeded in capturing Hoffler but it took much longer and cost him far more than he'd anticipated dysentery took hold among his men during long weeks of the siege and by the time the port fell in late September the force of fighting men that he still had left to him was down to under 10,000 and out of that 10,000 he had to leave 1200 to garrison Hoffler whose defenses had been severely compromised by the English attack but he didn't want to scurry back home straight across the channel that would hardly be the glorious statement of his rights and intentions that he planned but on the other hand he couldn't afford to do much more before winter set in he needed to regroup and to return to England to prepare for a campaign of siege conquest proper so the plan he settled on was this a march from half ler to Calais to demonstrate his freedom of movement and his power in this French Kingdom that he claimed as his with the additional benefit that it would draw the French military response away from half ler whose walls had in place has been reduced to rubble by English guns and therefore would be difficult to hold by its new English garrison against a concerted French attack so this march served a double purpose but all this march Henry and his much reduced army encountered an obstacle in the form of the river Somme the threat of massing French forces meant that he wasn't able to cross a river where he'd hoped at blanch tack and that in turn committed him to what turned into a total of 18 days of forced march before his tired and hungry men an army of somewhere under 8,000 soldiers with archers longbowman outnumbering the men-at-arms by something like five to one before this this tired and hungry force finally encountered the enemy at as an Corps now so far this narrative is not so unfamiliar or so inconsistent with the unfolding of Shakespeare's drama but what we need to consider is not just the size of the French army that confronted Henry's Englishman it's also the political context that produced it the French had been through their own years of turmoil in the decades since England and France had last met on a battlefield there King Charles the well-beloved had by this stage acquired a new that by now he was also known as Charles the mad back in 1392 at the age of just 23 he'd suffered a sudden fit of psychotic violence in which he'd attacked and killed five of his own attendants before he could be overpowered and disarmed and this turned out to be the beginning of a chronic mental illness with episodes of psychosis in which he believed that his wife and children were strangers that he wasn't called Charles that he wasn't king even that he was made of glass and might shatter into a thousand pieces if he were touched the Kings incapacity was so devastating that it precipitated France into a period of intense political crisis his closest relatives the great Lords of France began to compete among themselves for control of his government and the profits that came with it and that was a competition that as the years went on simply couldn't be resolved every time the king came back to his senses one set of decisions would be made and as soon as he lost them again those decisions would be undone and countermanded and all the time the tensions and the rivalries among the most powerful men in the kingdom grew worse and worse until in 1407 the King's brother Louie Duke of all Aeon was attacked hacked down and killed in a Paris street by servants of the Kings cousin John the fearless Duke of Burgundy you can see that you can for Leon lying dead in the street here with his left hand hacked off where he tried to protect himself against the sword blows this was a shocking murder and it meant that France was divided now not just by political rivalries but by a blood feud and soon by civil war extraordinarily John of Burgundy seen here very magnificent man and with a very fine line in black velvet hats as you can see but extraordinarily he didn't even attempt to deny the killing instead he argued that had been justified because all Eon had been a tyrant and a traitor that was an argument which of course got nowhere with the Duke of Orleans young son or his allies and by 1411 armies were in the field to fight the cause of the two factions who were now known as burgundians after their leader the Duke of Burgundy and Armagnac after the new young Duke of Orleans father-in-law the count of Armagnac campaign followed truce and troops followed campaign in this civil war and the turns of fortunes wheel were now so violent that one observer in Paris his name is now sadly lost to history but he kept a journal throughout these years that eyewitness in Paris concluded wearily that the great all hated each other both sides even looked for support to England in the last year's of the troubled reign of Henry the fourth and Prince Hal the future henry v was prepared to do business and send troops to help the burgundians while his father did the same with the almanacs so when how found himself on the throne and set about launching his invasion in 1415 he knew exactly what he was getting into and what moment he was taking advantage of this isn't simply a question of plucky England taking on the great might of France it was the English under the leadership of possibly the most able man ever to wear the English crown ruthlessly seizing a moment at which it seemed France was dismembering itself before the English enemy ever set foot on French soil of course once it became clear that Henry's intentions were serious and especially once it was apparent that Hoffler might fall the great Lords of France however much they might hate each other did stir in their kingdoms defense a call to arms sounded across northern France and the poor Mad King with his teenage son the Dauphin by his side was moved to rule the capital of Normandy from where the defense of the kingdom would be organized almost all the greatest Lords of France who were capable of fighting answered this call apart from the two greatest enemies within France's warring royal family John of Burgundy and Charles the new duke of all oil it seems that those two were given orders to stay away which seems a wise move on the part of the Royal Council them apart and away from the fighting given the danger that their own private war might spill over into the kingdoms campaign against the English but in the end since neither the King nor the doe found would in the end ride with their troops because both were too vulnerable and too precious to risk on the battlefield the decision was taken that the Duke of Orleans should be there after all as their nearest male relative and even though the Duke of Burgundy wouldn't be there his two brothers that you could bribe and on the count of NAVAIR would represent him so it was an imposing French army probably twelve thousand troops or more I should say at this point that the numbers on each side are still the subject of fierce academic controversy and I'm not proposing to wade into that argument now what is clear overall is that the French had a significantly larger army and that it was composed mainly of men-at-arms the number of men-at-arms in the smaller English army with many many times fewer because the bulk of the English forces were made up of archers longbowman of whom the French in turn had very few and the French plan was to use their superior numbers overall and particularly their superior numbers of men-at-arms to crush the English with an irresistible charge of heavy cavalry that would take out the archers leaving the way clear for the greater force of French men-at-arms to overwhelm their English opponents so on the morning of the 25th of October 1415 the two sides drew themselves up on open ground between the villages of as on-call and tan cool and the woodlands that surrounded the villages here we have a later representation of the battle and you'll see just how wrong it is we shouldn't envisage two blocks of longbowman pointing at each other with equal numbers all vaguely parallel numbers of armed not of horst men at arms behind we have to envisage a huge number of men at arms on foot and on horse on the French side wearing the white cross of France and on the English side overwhelmingly a force of archers with the few minute arms that Henri still left him gathered between and among them now the English army was exhausted after their long march and suffering from the physical and psychologically the physically and psychologically debilitating effects of days of heavy rain but we do have to remember that the conditions were much the same for the French troops for whom the weather had been no kinder and who had either been shadowing the English as they tried to find a crossing of the Somme or traveling at speed to join this hastily arranged rendezvous it's clear that the French did have force of numbers on their side what's less clear when we look simply at the numbers is that they had very little in the way of a plan or rather they did have the plan that their cavalry should charge down the English archers their men at arms should advance and that victory should follow but this was a plan that had been devised well in advance of their arrival at the battlefield and it therefore took no account of the ground over which the fighting would actually take place or the possibility that tactics might need to change in response to the disposition of the enemy's forces most important of all though was the fact that the French had no effective leadership and no chain of command such planning is there had been have been undertaken by what was in effect a committee of Lords all conscious of their status and vying for honor rather than focusing on the specific threat that this bedraggled enemy might still represent and that planning by committee was no replacement for what the English had the vision of an experienced military leader with a cool head and implacable resolve as well as the ability to communicate that resolve to his men the absence of an effective chain of command within the French forces was physically embodied in their frontline where all the great lords were jostling for a position of Honor even if that meant leading their leaving their men leaderless way behind them and once the fighting started this imbalance not of numbers but of leadership immediately began to tell the first wave of the French cavalry charge which was intended to overrun the archers who'd been placed on the two flanks of the English army ahead found that they were riding into a storm of English arrows the best long bowmen and English and Welsh archers were the best could shoot almost continuously and at close range the piercing heads of their arrows had a devastating effect even on men wearing plate armor not to mention the animals they rode those who somehow got through this dense rain of death found that they were riding on to death of a different kind because Henry had ordered each Archer to plant a six-foot sharpened stake into the ground next to him on which frightened horses suddenly found themselves impaled the cavalry charge on each flank and the advancing men at arms who found themselves funneled into an increasingly constricted space in between them continued to press forward as those at the front either fell or tried to turn back and that produce devastation of a third and horrifying kind the piling up of bodies of horses and men in the sucking mud so that death might come by suffocation or crushing if not by arrow or steak and I don't mean in any sense to be flippant when I say that we should perhaps think about our own experience of the Hillsborough disaster to get some kind of sense of what can happen when too many people are funneled into two smaller space and once those piles of helpless men and animals began to grow the archers the English archers who carried knives and axes at their belt could set about any still breathing with hacking blades there certainly was French hubris here a certainty of their own glorious supremacy and a fatal failure to take the enemy sufficiently seriously but what we have to recognize is that this wasn't a reflection of Shakespeare's indolent and arrogant aristocrats it was the outcome of a context in which France had had no leadership for years and not only no leadership but had found itself engulfed by a vicious and brutal struggle for power that undermined any attend at concerted or focused resistance to one of the greatest war leaders of the entire Middle Ages and that's the context we have to understand if we're to understand not just the battle itself but what came next because Agincourt didn't lead straight on shakespeare style to Henry being recognized as the heir to the French throne and the establishment of English France the battle did have powerful consequences first of all in practical terms the French dead included many nobles because they'd all been crowding into the into the front line the rate of attrition among the great Lords of France was extraordinarily high among the dead were the dukes of Allen song and bar the constable the highest military officer in the kingdom and the Duke of Burgundy 'he's two brothers not only that but more princes of the blood were prisoners that you could bauble the counter writ regional and most importantly charles of all you'll hear shown in the Tower of London as a prisoner writing the poetry for which he later became famous and the shape of the war with England and the civil war within France would be profoundly shaped by these losses of personnel for the next two decades but it wasn't only that defeat at what the French called the wretched day of as uncle had provide profound effects to in political conceptual theological terms which we underestimate at our peril the war of 1415 like all medieval Wars was a conflict in which God had been involved from the very beginning the outcome of battles contemporaries believed was always the result of God's will and so from the English point of view interpreting what had happened that fateful day was a matter of the utmost simplicity Henry's claim to the throne of France and also his dynasty's right to wear the crown of England had been gloriously vindicated by his astonishing victory the very fact that this was a rerun of David Van vanquishing an arrogant Goliath proved that this was heavens mandate in Henry was fighting a just war and that was made absolutely plain in the account of the campaign written by one of the royal chaplains who'd formed the spiritual core of the of the English army they sat behind the English lines as the battle raged at Agincourt praying furiously for divine intervention and when he wrote up his account of what had happened he said that Henry was the true elect of God his own soldier another chronicler reported in all seriousness that's in George himself had been spotted on the battlefield fighting on the English side and here we have a contemporary illustration of that facts in fact you could Bedford Henry the fifth younger brother who later became regent of France encountering sin George here you can see here is not only wearing his own red cross but he's wrapped in the blue robes of the Order of the Garter he's an English knight through and through so the question that remained for henry v uncle the Bishop of Winchester addressing Parliament in 1416 was this given that the English had won so many notable victories he mentioned a choice in 30-40 poitiers in 1356 and now a zinc or in 1415 why were the French so slow to get the message Oh God he said why does this wretched and stiff-necked nation not obey these divine sentences so many and so terrible to which by a vengeance most clearly made manifest obedience is demanded of them but for the French explaining their defeat was more difficult it couldn't possibly be that the English were actually right that much they knew instead God must be using the English to punish the French temporarily for their sins but if sin was the heart of the matter then whose sin was most at fault and that question was unanswerable in the context of the brutal divisions within France as each side pointed an accusing finger at the other the net effect therefore of their defeat on the field of blood as uncle was to redouble the violence of the civil war Henry meanwhile was a long way from achieving his objectives he had his bridgehead at half learned he had God on his side but it was the intensifying conflict between Burgundians and harmony acts that gave him time to plan a new campaign and then in fourteen seventeen when his new fleet was ready to sail it gave him the perfect opportunity to advance across Normandy while France's domestic enemies fought for control of their own capital and our Parisian observer was already coming round to the view that this English assault was no longer the worst of the horrors France had to face some people he wrote who had come to Paris from Normandy having escaped from the English by paying ransom or some other way had then been captured by the Burgundians and then a mile or so further on had been captured yet again by the army acts and had been as brutally and as cruelly treated by them as if by Saracens these men all honest merchants reputable men who had been in the hands of all three and had bought their freedom solemnly affirmed on oath that the English had been kinder to them than the begun d ins had and the Burgundians hundred times kinder than the Armagnac s-- meanwhile with characteristically inexorable purpose henry was moving step by step across normandy first he took the great castle in town of calm and with it buyer then Alice all our Chantal and fellows and then in January 14 19 after a five month siege he finally starved rule the capital of Normandy into submission two weeks after that his forces were only 30 miles from Paris and again our anonymous observer had some pithy points to make no one he said did anything about it because all the French Lords were angry with each other because the dough found was at odds with his father on account of the Duke of Burgundy who was with the king and all the other princes of the blood royal had been taken prisoner by the English King at the Battle of as uncle but the key to Henry's triumph wasn't that battle and it wasn't even his formidable advance into the heart of northern France during 1418 and the early months of 1419 the key to Henry's success in getting his hands on the crown of France or at least much nearly than any of his predecessors or his successors was an event that took place on the 10th of September 14 19 the desperate search for a settlement between the burgundians and the Armenians had produced frantic diplomacy in the summer months envoy's had met in all possible combinations English in Armagnac Armagnac and Burgundian Burgundian and English but the one that really mattered was the meeting convened in September between the Duke of Burgundy himself and the Armagnac Dothan this wasn't the same doe phone as at Agincourt hours the six sons had an unfortunate habit of dying young this was his now his youngest son Charles the new dopher and the Duke of Burgundy and the young dhofar still in his teens met at Monty Hall where the river yawn gave in to the sin and like many diplomatic meetings this one was arranged for security reasons in the middle of a bridge both sides agreed to meet with no more than 10 men each and the meeting place meant that neither could be ambushed by some hidden army so that afternoon the dopher and the Duke gathered as arranged within a specially constructed wooden enclosure in the middle of the bridge the Duke knelt at the dophins feet and then the man standing next to the doe phone a former servant of the Duke of all yon named Tanguy du Chatel buried an ax deep in the Dukes skull it was a murder more precisely planned and more ruthlessly executed than the Duke of Burgundy 'he's murder of the Duke of Orleans self in the streets of Paris 12 years earlier and it was a murder that irretrievably altered the essence of the conflict because now there could be no hope no hope whatsoever that reconciliation could be brokered between Armagnac and Burgundian and the direct result of that was a treaty sealed at twatt in May 14 2010 reader fifths ambitions finally came to fruition there in the cathedral henry bound himself to marry the french princess catherine the daughter of the mad king charles the 6th and in return the mad king himself speaking of course through person of his loyal subject the Duke of Burgundy the son of the Duke whose skull had been stabbed in at Montero the Mad King disinherited the dopher who'd been responsible for that terrible crime and recognized instead that Henry the fifth should be the heir to France after the King's death and regent of the kingdom until that time that's the true story that the gorgeous drama of Shakespeare's Henry v leaves out the creation of English France not through his victory at Agincourt astonishing though it was but through the bitter and bloody civil war in France in which the dreadful defeat of as uncle played a significant part so that by 1420 the hatred between the two sides within France was so intense that large parts of the kingdom including the capital Paris would rather see the English king on the French throne than the so-called Dauphin and that was a story that would play itself out over the next thirty years the battle between English France in the north and the Kingdom of Borge in the south as Armagnac France came to be called and this wasn't a story with an inevitable ending so we need to remember in telling the story of Agincourt that France could have ended up taking on a very different shape geographically or politically though what did eventually transpire takes us back to our beginning our greatest hits and the extraordinary intervention of another charismatic military leader every bit as certain as Henry the fifth that God was on her side the victories rather than the execution of Joan of Arc so I have one last thought to leave you with England had its own Civil War later in the 15th century a civil war that we know as the Wars of the Roses it began in earnest once all of Henry's games in France were finally lost in 1450 and it came about because the son born to Henry and the French Princess Catherine didn't take after his father instead he grew to be a king who was vague and indecisive and as the years went on increasingly mentally absent no decision he made couldn't be overturned by the next person too whisper in his ear in other words he didn't take after his father he took after his maternal grandfather the Mad King Charles the 6th of France so if we want to understand the whole sweep of the 15th century history of England and France the huge and dramatic story that goes far beyond the glittering jewel of Shakespeare's Henry the fifth there are many reasons not to begin and end our tale with the Battle of Agincourt thank you very much you

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Keywords: gresham, gresham lecture, gresham college, gresham talk, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, lord mayor, london, City of London, dominic reid, tracey hill, Robert green, typographer, history, london history, lord mayor’s show, parade, mayor, doves type, book launch, military history, 100 years war, war, warfare, Hanery v, France, french history, war with French, one hundred years war, agincourt, azincourt, longbow, longbowmen

Id: NTYcJuZd7BY

Length: 44min 16sec (2656 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

In the year of the battle's 600th anniversary, Agincourt remains one of the most resonant names in the roll-call of English military history.r

Thanks to Shakespeare, the triumphant tale is embedded in our national psyche: the astonishing victory against overwhelming odds of Henry V's 'happy few' over the flower of French chivalry. But if we cry God for Harry, England and St George, we tell only half the story. What of those who cried God for Charles, France and St Denis? The battle is set in its fifteenth-century context - when the outcome of military conflict was understood as the result of God's will - and unravels the implications of two contrasting narratives: English victory at Agincourt, and French defeat on the field they knew as Azincourt.

France's loss is a perfect example of why kings and hereditary ruling classes are a bad idea.